A letter written by Albert Einstein to Jewish philosopher Eric Gutkind just sold at auction for $404,000. That's not the news, though. It's the contents of the letter that have surprised some, although it merely reveals what most of us already knew: he was an atheist. That's only pseudo-news, the result of a concerted effort to portray him as some kind of covert advocate of Intelligent Design. I've been reading Einstein's writings and biographical material about him for almost 60 years. I own first editions of some of his earliest published works (pre-relativity). I sent him a birthday card when I was in elementary school and kept a scrapbook about him when he died and the newspapers were full of stories. When I applied for conscientious objector status in the vietnam years I cited his writings as support for my own views about religion. At that time CO status was only granted on religious grounds (at least by my draft board). He was one of my culture heroes.
So these words come as no surprise:
... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. (Translation printed in The Guardian)
Einstein, like many scientists (including me), retained a sense of wonder that the world is comprehensible. That's the sense of his oft quoted aphorism, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
Einstein, as he says in his autobiographical notes, lost his religion at the age of 12, concluding that it was all a lie, and he never looked back. But he never lost his religious feeling about the apparent order of the universe or his intuitive connection with its mystery, which he savored. "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is its comprehensibility," he once said.
"If something is in me that can be called religious," he wrote in another letter, in 1954, "then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as science can reveal it." (AP via New York Times)
This isn't "Intelligent Design." For Einstein knowledge of the world is co-extensive with whatever knowledge science can reveal of it. The only thing Einstein would have called religious is his wonder and admiration that science can reveal the world at all. To that extent he and many other scientists, including us, are religious, I suppose. But only to that extent. That's to use a private language and has little to do with religion as most people understand it. Unfortunately to even talk this way today is to cloud the issue, an issue that has become seriously confused and obfuscated by those who cannot bear to discard mythologies they learned when young.
It's true that Einstein did lend his name to various Jewish causes, including Zionist ones. Passages in the letter show that whatever his reasons, they weren't religious:
For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.
The Gutkind letter, written in uncompromising language as a gentle intellectual rebuke to a philosopher who claimed special status for humans and even more for those humans who espoused a single one of hundreds of possible religions and cults, probably won't settle the issue for anyone who cannot imagine how anyone could be without a belief in God (or as Einstein might put it, belief in a god). But it certainly is strong evidence for those of us who identify Einstein with the spirit of the Enlightenment and deny that his beliefs were in any way akin to the mythology being smuggled into rational discourse via the language of Intelligent Design.
He's still my culture hero.
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Einstein, A. (1940). "Science and religion". Nature 146: 605607.
Einstein was a very good communicator, partly was due to his sense of humor. I am fond of this one; "Gravity cannot be held responsible for people falling in love." -- Albert Einstein
He liked to play violin. But if you invite the professional critic to comment his music standard, I bet that he would not pass.
His life experience as a partner might not be good example.
His religious language certainly was not good, Paul Tillich had good comments. The languages of science and faith are in different dimensions.
So, Einstein's letter of denying the chosen-ness of his tribe; scientifically and under the context of modernity were relevant.
All the truths are paradoxical; for instance, by saying that everyone can choose his chosen-ness, then we dig the deeper level in spiritual metaphor. By pretending that there is no chosen-ness at all is questionable and therefore is imaginatively impoverished.
Biblical traditions are the cornerstone of science and democracy. Children have grown up and are wise to respect their parents. Rebellion in younger stage is the sign of parent's un-conditional love. But the forever rebellion is a sign of an un-mature psychology.
Sigmund Freud- another member of Einstein's tribe, in his 80's finally realized the valuable legacies from his tradition:
- The faith in God facilitated a turn towards the life within, helping to make a rich of introspection possible;
- To see the Jewish faith that he was born into as a source of cultural progress in the past and of personal inspiration in the present;
- To recognize the poetry and promise in religion.
The age of 67 to the age of S. Freud's 80; the countdown is 13. Sir, it is not in year, in the unit of month. :-) Library Lady perhaps thinks that the unit of day is posible, who knows?
All the things people attribute to faith in God are demonstrated in atheists. Our own Revere is a fine human being without a tad of belief in God. I dropped God and not a thing changed in me except I got free of boring sermons (free to enjoy Revere's Sunday morning essays!). It would follow that the good things attributed to a faith in God come in fact from within individual humans since we find good in atheists, atheists who have great introspection, mercy, kindness etc. We find evil in believers - using the office of the priest or pastor to abuse children for instance. Obviously the belief in God is not the determining factor in what a human being is like, instead it is something in themselves and in their life history.
Revere and K: well-said.
I may have mentioned this before at this site, but here I go again, with my favorite Einstein quote (among several good quotes):
"All mathematicians make mistakes; good mathematicians find them."
It gives me hope that someday I'll find all my mistakes and become a good mathematician; and of course it is a reminder to always check your work. I think it applies to all professions, e.g. plumbers, not just mathematicians.
K,
I agree with your take wholeheartedly. Ditto on the well said. I believe, that the wrongs perpetuated by religions go back centuries and unfortunately they will continue on into the future.
revere: your (Translation printed in The Guardian) goes to the New York Times link. Could you please fix it.
Never mind I found it.
"As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are ((protected)) from the worst cancers by a lack of power. ((Otherwise)) I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."
So, the conclusion is that Einstein had recognized the trait of chosen-ness in a very humble way. It was a wise reminder to his Jewish philosopher.
Over the fireplace in the Fine Hall Common Room at Princeton University is inscribed a saying of Einstein: "Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist Er nicht" ("The Lord God is subtle, but He is not mischievous"). Plus: "God does not play dice." No wonder that people would think that he had been linked with ID. Under the current debate in idiosyncratic American evolution/creation platform, I hope that Einstein will not be consumed in a radical way. (Europeans especially Germany are able to look at ID in a metaphorical way, maybe too much distorted interpretation from fundamentalists in the United States.)
Einstein did attend Christian services and he had good interactions with Christian Science's founder, his children were Catholic. He was a very open-minded world citizen.
To put him as an atheist maybe not so correct; as an agnostic maybe. Definitely he was a person of faith; just depend on how you look under different context.
It is no meaning to say he was a Christian just because he attended Christian service for a period of time, or someone sang in the Choir. :-) But pretending there was nothing happened when he was continuing attending the services is questionable.
It has always baffled me as to why anyone would care what Einstein thought about religion. It's self-evident that he had no particular insight, much less expertise, on the subject. The myths that have encrusted Einstein, built up by the sycophants who surrounded him, have ended in nothing more or less than a cult of personality. Maybe we should ask Kim Jong-il what he thinks about unified field theory. Makes about as much sense to me.
tenpenny: I don't think anyone would care except that theists have made a big deal about it, not atheists. They seized on some of his metaphors for science as an excuse to claim him as a covert ID adherent or something similar. So you don't care, and neither do I. But plenty of "people of faith" seemed to care.
Regarding your allusion to his being surrounded by sycophants, hardly. He was one of the least pretentious of people and never responded to sycophancy and didn't suffer fools. Or are you just alluding to his well deserved reputation as one of the greatest physicists in history? Perhaps you disagree? On what basis would that be?
Regarding his expertise in religion, who exactly do you think has that kind of expertise? The Pope? A rabbi. Some priest? A Buddhist monk? A theologian? The Dalai Lama? "Expertise in religion" is a rather curious idea and I'm not sure I understand what you mean by it.
Revere as you note it is the theists who point to Einstein's supposed belief in God to somehow prove God. The atheist wouldn't need to react if they would just leave it alone. Note that the theists remain unable to explain why a loving and powerful God would let little boys and girls be sold as sex slaves often at age 12 or younger - sold to have their bodies used and abused by adults (even sometimes they get abused by their spiritual leaders). This is just one of the examples of either the depravity of powerlessness of the imagined gods. If they exist they are weak or evil. Since this question cannot be answered in such a way that God remains worthy of worship they try to hang God's coattails on humans like Einstein. Pitiful God who needs to be affirmed that way eh?
Revere, how does anyone gain any expertise in anything? Isn't it by devoting one's life, or at least a substantial portion of one's life, to mastering it? Einstein devoted his life to physics. Some people devote their lives to epidemiology. Some people devote their lives to religion. But not Einstein. He didn't devote his life, or any substantial portion of his life, to religion. Ergo, his opinions about religion are likely (with a probability approaching 1.0) to have about the same worth as the haberdasher who lived down the street from him.
Revere, I didn't mean to imply that the people who knew Einstein personally were sycophants, or that he tolerated sycophants. My wording there was poor. What I meant is that Einstein's name is now commonly invoked as a kind of superconducting mantra of hyper-rationality, in a way that no one, not even a genius like Einstein, can sustain. It's silly and should be called out as such. Newton was greater anyway. :-)
tenpenny: OK. We can argue about who was greater, Newton or Einstein, but I guess we can agree they were both pretty good, right? About the expertise, I still don't get it. Priests are experts in religion by this definition, but of course all they know is one religion and some of them don't even know that much about that one, at least in the scholarly sense. I agree with you that Einstein has no particular warrant to make pronouncements about God, although he has plenty of expertise about what he thinks about religion, which is what was at issue. He was also not a super rationalist, as many of his comments indicate, so anyone who thinks of him that way (and I'm not sure that's how he's viewed) is mistaken.
As a Scientist, Einstein was given credit for much of what was not his by the media, who was being built up for his main mission to promote Zionism. He was a smart guy, perhaps a genius, but his General Theory of relativity was produced at the same time as Hilberts, and Hilbert had shared his papers with Einstein, as Einstein is said to have done with Hilbert. Einstein outsourced the math which was beyond him to Grossman and Klein, while Hilbert was a superior mathemetician and did not need to outsource to anyone. It sounds like a joint effort, but we only know of Einstein.
Much of the Special Theory of Relativity, his earliest discovery, came from Maxwell and Lorentz, while Einstein to his credit put the pieces of the puzzle together. To his discredit, in his paper, he did not give any credit to those whose ideas and theories he used.
Space-Time and light bending were also not original. But thats science, you build up what others have done, not taking anything away from Einstein except the myth that all work he produced was original and that if not for his genious, the world would be less informed than it is today.
Einstein was as much a philosopher as a scientist. He did not work out of a lab and was not a great mathematician. He represents the science in philosophy, while his religous counterpart was Baruch Spinoza in the 1600's.
Both believed in an amorphous God reflected in the unity of natures laws, a divine nature if you will. The personal god of todays major religions was denied by both, for obvious reasons. Einstein was a devout believe in Spinoza's view of God, which BTW earned Spinoza his expulsion by the rabbis.
Einstein said humans trying to understand God was like entering a great library not knowing how to read, with billions of books written in languages one does not know.
It is something beyond us.
The curious thing I find about atheists, is that this belief there is no God in any form uses the same "faith" that religous have in a personal God. Neither have any proof.
I believe science (thesis) and religion (anti-thesis) must at some point synthesize into a new belief system. For the religous, I say, who are you to judge the tools the God you believe in uses to create. And if God is the creator, then certainly he created the laws that nature follows too, and undertanding the laws of nature (science), leads one to an understanding of God. Religion is the study of the divine law of man, while science is the study of the laws of nature. They can and should be merged.
the problem is, that theology is not really science.
It devotes its existence to "believe" which is required as an axiom.
If you want to logically,scientificially examine evidence for the (non-)
existence of God - you must end up with physics.
Revere, I agree with you that both Newton and Einstein were great. Of course they were! Now if I could just get you to understand that, for example, Saint Maximus the Confessor (ca. 580-662) was great, and more importantly, why he was great... But that won't happen, I think, because your mind is closed to that form of greatness from the get-go, because you think it was founded on fantasies, and therefore you would never devote any of your precious life-time to studying Maximus, thus forming no expertise that would even allow you to properly evaluate what he did. But, as an intellectual achievement within Christian theology, what Maximus did was indeed great. Take it from someone who has studied him (albeit only on a modest scale).
By the way, have you studied Newton enough to penetrate the veneer that has prevented generations of students from hearing the full truth about him? Talk about a man who was fired up about God!
That said, I simply have to append the following, which I wrote earlier, in a burst of irritation, but which is fit to publish because, although stinging, I think it contains seeds of truth...
Let me see if I have this right. Once per week - appropriately, on Sunday - you trot out the latest cartoonish aspect of "pop" religion that happens to be in the news, and you have your fun with it. In most cases, your targets deserve ridicule. I'm with you that far. When people who practice and study religion in a more meaningful way occasionally point out to you that you're painting with too broad a brush, I've actually seen you concede the point, but then you've gone on to say that people who are serious about religion in a good way (or at least do no harm, from your perspective) are statistically insignificant, and therefore not worth taking into account. That's where you lose me. Because by that standard, I am right to lampoon Einstein, and are wrong to defend him, because people like you who have learned about Einstein in depth are statistically inisgnificant. If you doubt what I say, I have two words for you: Baby Einstein. 'Nuff said.
Alright, not quite. You are aware, aren't you, that the Baby Einstein product line is produced by Walt Disney Company, and that Einstein's estate receives huge royalties from Disney - so much so that, according to Forbes Magazine, Einstein is among the top five highest-earning dead celebrities? Yes, the same Disney company that was founded on cartoons and which vigorously promotes a cartoon worldview, is all over Einstein. The Baby Einstein products prey on the status anxiety of neurotic parents, according to Alissa Quart, in an article in the Atlantic. The Baby Genius Edutainment Complex, as Quart calls it, has become a huge industry. It's built and sustained on the enduring premise that a sucker is born every minute. Our current hapless president - a man I know you hold in high esteem - even singled out, in last year's State of the Union Address, the founder of Baby Einstein Co., Julie Aigner-Clark.
You will no doubt protest: it's not fair to pin any of this on Einstein himself. How was he to know that years after his death, his memory would so misused? Given the fact that you pin every atrocity committed in the name of religion to religion, you must pardon me if I am not much impressed by such a defense of Einstein from you.
tenpenny: I understand your point. Here is the theme here on Sunday Sermonette. It is consistently and deliberately meant to be subversive of religion in the US. It has very little to do with religion, per se, but about the role of religion as a political weapon against many things I stand for. I am just as opposed, for the same reasons, to nationalism, patriotism, sexism and other forms of tribalism. If I am against sexism it doesn't mean I am against gender or sex or men or women. I believe if you go back through the Sunday posts you will see this is the underlying theme of most of them. Regarding any benefits the Einstein Estate gets from Baby Einstein, this is the first I've heard of it. I'd like to know more about it. Regarding the intellectual content and achievement of theology, I have no quarrel. The same can be said for chess, literature, music, the strategy of warfare, the art of magic, etc., etc. It is worth asking, however, why Einstein and Newton are thought of differently. It isn't because their intellects are necessarily more powerful (we have no way to test this) but what they applied their intellects to. Among scientists they are at the top. The question whether Einstein is greater than Aquinas or Buber or Gandhi has no meaning to me because they are not comparable (in the literal sense that they aren't measured on the same scales).
Well said, pft.
I can not say better than this paragraph: "For the religious, I say, who are you to judge the tools the God you believe in uses to create. And if God is the creator, then certainly he created the laws that nature follows too, and understanding the laws of nature (science), leads one to an understanding of God. Religion is the study of the divine law of man, while science is the study of the laws of nature. They can and should be merged."
Some people use the term convergence, it is same with your expression; the convergence in science and religion has been seen more and more day by day.
Revere's Sermonettes are treating the wrongdoings of many xism is really a hard work and good IMHO; therefore I have kept my interest in dialogues. pft takes another angle is positive and constructive perhaps is true REVERE philosophy in action.
I think that Spinoza's influence on Einstein is very true. Good analysis. Thanks.
tenpenny: I have seen many relevant points in your posts. What is your advice on the proper manner for this kind of dialogue in the future?
Let us test Revere's capability of positive and constructive methodology. :-)
I personally think the mission of pointing wrongdoing is nearly fulfilled; it is the time to dig the deeper level- I agree with your observation.
I have read Revere's mentioning of possible reciprocating methodology. Maybe he forgot to watch the clock?
Earthquake?
Phhfft: "The curious thing I find about atheists, is that this belief there is no God in any form uses the same "faith" that religous have in a personal God. Neither have any proof."
How laughable that theists can't come to grips with reality. Here's some reality for ya, buddy. Faith is the belief in something WITHOUT PROOF OF IT'S EXISTENCE. There is no FAITH involved for the overwhelming majority of atheists. (In fact, for those like me who prefer the term-"apatheists", we don't see a god, nor any sign that there has ever been one, so we don't care to give a shit about it.) You can try attaching labels to us that are only yours, but they just keep falling off. The same can be said for those who proclaim that atheism is a sort of religion. Complete nonsense. Atheists are even harder to classify than Democrats! The ONLY thing we have in common is the lack of belief in a god, gods, or anything supernatural. When you attempt to label us, all it does is project your concerns about god and religion onto us, where it dies from neglect.
The metaphorical meaning in religious expression; for instances like "the chosen people" and "man were created by the image of God( Imago dei)" to be possibly demythologized by other expressions- the creative minority and man's uniqueness?
The danger of demythology is that it is losing the paradoxical nature and power, therefore the re-interpretation is more appropriate. I would not take the advice from a scientist; when the job is relating to re-interpretation.